Beloved

“Slavery’s impact in mother/children relationship and heterosexual love in Toni Morrison’s Beloved”:
Beloved is a novel written by Chloe Anthony Wofford, best known by her literary name Toni Morrison, in 1987. It was the fifth novel written by Toni Morrison with which she won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. This novel fits into the subgenre of African American Literature known as Neo-SlaveNarrative. Toni Morrison was born in Ohio on February 18, 1931; she was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, becoming the first African American woman novelist in winning this distinction. Through this essay we are going to deal with the subject of slavery as presented in Beloved in several fields of life in order to illustrate the trauma and the effect that slavery has on human psyche.Beloved show us the great deal of violence and mistreatments that slaves had to support in life. Slavery was needed in the areas where there was good soil and climate for large plantations that needed intensive labors of cultivation, such as tobacco, cotton, coffee etc. By the early decades of the 19th century, the great majority of slaveholders and slaves were in the southern United States. By theCivil War, most slaves were held in the Deep South, where they were engaged in a work-gang system of agriculture on large plantations; two-thirds worked on cotton. In these plantations, slaves had to work very hard and they were supervised almost always by white men. In Beloved slavery is presented with relevant dates and places even after abolitionism, Toni Morrison give us a realist idea of slaveryis “Eighteen seventy-four and white folks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; 87 lynching in one year alone in Kentucky. Four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken”. (180). It is not strange to think that slaves as Sethe wanted to escape of thatprecarious situation and get freedom as it is described in the novel, Freedom supposed to them the possibility of being in a place where is permitted to love whoever you want and where you don’t need permission for your desires. But, as it is presented in the novel escape from slavery is very difficult, even though far from the plantation, characters as Baby Suggs, Sethe Suggs and Paul D are not ableto release themselves from the traumatic heritage that slavery originated inside their minds.
Having talked about slavery we cannot go on without mentioning the term trauma that is of main subject of the novel and it is tied to slavery since the traumatic experiences that characters had to undergo with slavery in Sweet Home plantation serves as the justification for the problems that thecharacters have in life. Judith Herman, a trauma specialist and psychiatrist, explains that because of the constant interruptions of trauma, the traumatized individual is not able to resume the usual course of her life, (Trauma and Recovery, Herman 37- 41). In an essay that examines the dominant psychology model of trauma in literacy criticism, the term trauma is defined as “a person's emotional responseto an overwhelming event that disrupts previous ideas of an individual's sense of self and the standards by which one evaluates society.”(Trends in literary trauma theory). Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience develops a theory about trauma in literature, Caruth is very close to the contents of Beloved when she says that "trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in anindividual's past, but rather in the way its very unassimilated nature the way it was precisely not known in the first instance--returns to haunt the survivor later on" (Caruth 4), because even there’s one event in the novel that is the most loaded with trauma that corresponds to the killing of the baby by Sethe, Although almost all the character in the novel are haunted by the trauma of slavery...